POJOsToForms

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This is from a discussion on the struts-user mailing list. I'm continuing it here because I want to propose a new idea: only converting ActionForms to POJOs.

When I first started developing with Struts (pre 1.0), I'd just have a simple form with a DTO (VO back then) as a getter/setter on my form. In the last year, I've changed to have a DTO and a Form, where the DTO has the true data types (Long, Date, etc) and the form has only Strings. After doing it both ways, it seems like the DTO as a getter/setter is really the better way to go. I'm not trying to say it's the *right* way according to the design patterns, I'm just offering my $.02 from experience. I continue to do it the BeanUtils.copyProperties() way, but the projects I work on that do it the other way seem cleaner.

For an example of a DTO -> BeanUtils.copyProperties() -> Form, check out the following links:

DTO -> User.java (source: http://tinyurl.com/emo7) Conversion -> UserManagerImpl.java (source: http://tinyurl.com/emof - see convert() method). This extends BaseManager (http://tinyurl.com/emok), which registers custom converters. No DateConverter in this example, but I've done it at my day job, so I know it's fairly easy. Form -> UserForm.java (generated via XDoclet from User.java)